Mundus Obumbrandus

Let me wax serious for a moment. Right now, I’m involved with the Nanowrimo (go look at http://www.nanowrimo.org, you know you want to). It’s a barrel of laughs, let me tell you — provided you manage to stay ahead of the deadline, which I’m doing so far. When the writing is good, it’s great and it has a tendency to fill your whole world.

I heard a friend of mine died today. I knew he was sick, but he didn’t want any visitors, and I heard through the grapevine that the doctors gave him three more years of life, easy. Some other friends and I were talking about all signing an extra-special card and mailing it to him, and now… Yeah.

When the writing is good, it’s great. It has a tendency to fill your whole world for a time. Then life happens, and for a moment you’re thrown out of your own little creation and back into the world. I don’t think I have a real point to make, here. Someday, I may use this experience for my work, as cold as that may sound. There’s a little bit of the writer, the creator, in every product. Every person is who they are, because of all the experiences they’ve had, the people they’ve known.

When the writing is good, it fills your world. When the writing is great, your world fills the writing. To an author, the writing should be his or her immortality, and the immortality of everyone and all they care about.

I could go into a lot of jabber about the subconscious throwing up bits of you and it ending up in writing, but I’m not in the mood just now. Sometimes you mean to put your experiences in the work, other times it just happens without your conscious effort.

Goodbye, Bart. Maybe I’ll see someone like you in my writing someday and be surprised. Surprised, but not displeased; you’re good people. Au revoir.

Hi there.

I’m not going to apologize for my long absence this time. I woke up at bloody six in the morning on a day off and couldn’t get back to sleep, so now you all get to suffer the weirdness that passes through my brain. ^^ Lucky you. Sit down and take a good look, it might be educational and my brain is where the writing process takes place.

Supposedly ‘standard’ reality. The stuff we take for granted. Why do we take it for granted?

I mean, go into your bathroom and take a good look in the mirror. You’ve seen that face of yours for years now, and I know that it’s normal for a human, but man, just think about it for a moment. You have two highly advanced devices that take photons bounced off of matter and translate it into imagery. You think that’s normal? It’s effin’ fantastic! It’s taken science how much time to come up with something that approximates the same job? And you use it every single day without even thinking about it!

While I’m talking eyeballs, let’s move out a bit. The face. A covering of skin and muscles on your skull. How the heck did it end up looking like that? I know, I know, our human aesthetic says this is what’s ‘right’, but that’s just because we don’t know any better. Look at the nose and try to really see it, don’t just accept it’s there. What is that? o_o What is up with the ears? I gather it’s more efficient for them to be flaps of cartilage that stick out so they can better catch sound waves and direct them into the earhole, and hence to the eardrum, but still. That shape is whacky.

To round off this little game of Look at that, check out the hand. How many people sit down and marvel at the opposable thumb? Those little guys are a significant part of what allowed us humans, as a species, to get off every bigger creature’s menu. The brain conceives of brilliant plans (pit traps, poisons, spears) to get off of the bigger guy’s dinner plate, but the opposable thumb is what allows us to carry such plans out. No thumbs, no advanced tools.

Look at all those tiny wonders that make up your body, then imagine how things could be different.

Imagine a race of creatures with advanced brains — and no thumbs. They could be a species of large sea slugs, who strain their intellect every day to find new and better hiding places, whose creative genius is used to construct safe, undetectible lairs with their own slime and pebbles.

Imagine a species with brains and thumbs — but little or no eyesight. How would society change if we were all fumbling around in the dark, having to rely on touch, taste, sound and smell? I imagine techno music would suffer for one; we’d probably advance our hearing a lot more, and loud music wouldn’t be as popular as it is.

What would we be like without hearing? Would our society be more meerkat-like, with sentinels standing at every crossing, continuously looking around to prevent terrible accidents? Crossing guards would be plentiful, I’m sure; someone would need to save all the ear-less little children from being hit by cars they couldn’t hear, the way they run around.

Look at the things you think are ordinary, and try to see all the miracles you’ve lived with for so long that you think them ordinary. Try imagining what the world would be like if one of those little wonders were absent, or different. Organic technology. A nocturnal society. Olfactory writing. Work that out, and you have a concept to start writing with.

Yyyyeah, I’ve been away for quite a while. What can I say? Sometimes life gets in the way. *coughs* Without further ado, on to the blogging.

I’d like to bend your ear about one of the most dreaded concepts of computer gaming: the Bad End.

When someone starts reading a story, then can end up in just about any kind of world. It could be a beautiful utopia, it could be a soul-crushing dystopia, it could be any kind of place in any kind of time. The reader is usually invited in some way to identify with the protagonist, the hero of the tale. Whatever conflict faces Our Hero(tm), the reader is there with him or her, facing the same problems. The most basic expectation is that Our Hero will win in the end. No matter the hardship faced, we want Our Hero to save the day and come through, perhaps with more scars than what he or she started with, perhaps a bit less perky and innocent, but still ultimately victorious.

What do the readers feel when that doesn’t happen?

Logically speaking, most people who try to fight giants should be turned into sticky red stains on the bottom of their enemies’ feet. Logically speaking, someone who tries to change the world is more than likely to be disappointed. But how many people pick up a book and expect the story to be governed by logic? Especially if the book is of the science fiction or fantasy themes? In horror, it is more common for Our Hero to suffer defeat, but even then, I think people are hoping for the protagonist to buck the odds and win out.

But in some stories, they just don’t.

I know I hate it when that happens. I really, really do hate it. Watching the character through whose eyes you saw die or otherwise fail at the end is upsetting to me.

But I do understand that in some stories, it is necessary. You can’t always buck the odds. Some stories were written not to have the reader cheer, but to wring a tear from their eye. It may not sound nice, but stories are created to evoke all sorts of thoughts and emotions from the reader. Some writers even specialize in negative endings, for whatever reasons they may have, and they are still read quite eagerly.

I am not a huge fan of the concept, and even I have used it once or twice. Of course it helps that you don’t have to make the end the absolute worst it can be. There are shades of Bad to every Bad End. Save the world, but lose the love of your life. Get the love of your life, but lose the crown and the respect of your followers. Get neither girl nor gold, but live to fight another day, even if that other day is never written about. I’m sure anyone who reads this blog will get the idea.

And so this blog post has a more positive end.